


and not ask leave of any

by endquestionmark



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-30 22:46:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3954724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Furiosa is built sturdy, she knows that, but rangy still, from years of being backed into corners and having to fight her way out. Max, though, is solid through and through. She brackets him against the wall and boxes him in with the set of her hips, the breadth of her shoulders; he responds in kind, letting the tension he habitually carries in his hunched shoulders transmute into something banked, a power play. What he has in brute strength, she makes up in determination and fury. They’re well matched.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and not ask leave of any

**Author's Note:**

> Don't ask me what kind of oil it is. It isn't guzzoline and that is all that you or I need to know about post-apocalyptic lube.

Furiosa is built sturdy, she knows that, but rangy still, from years of being backed into corners and having to fight her way out. Max, though, is solid through and through. She brackets him against the wall and boxes him in with the set of her hips, the breadth of her shoulders; he responds in kind, letting the tension he habitually carries in his hunched shoulders transmute into something banked, a power play. What he has in brute strength, she makes up in determination and fury. They’re well matched.

She isn’t angry right now, though; this isn’t that. It isn’t reproach for his long absence, just as it isn’t gratitude for the tribute he brought from the Bullet Farm, rounds and rounds of ammunition in coiled belts. Four of them were sent special for her, and Max brought them to her draped across his chest and waist; his walk was heaver, more purposeful, and she hadn’t said anything, but her gaze had spoken for her. When she’d looked him in the face again, eyes still slightly narrowed and evaluating, she knew that he had heard.

Furiosa’s heard the whispering: _attack mutt_ , they say, _choke chain_ , _tight leash_ , words that would have lost their relevance years ago if not for the way that people had made up for the savagery of extinct beasts, more than matching it. They say that she taught him to speak again, which is not true; they say that she made him into something she could use, which is less untrue. On the road, she had no time to teach him anything, except to demonstrate through action that she would not bleed him without cause or without his choice, and that he could be something other than viciously feral. Furiosa still isn’t sure that she believes it — the world is beyond hard now, transcending indifference, actively hostile, and she in turn has become a creature of sinew and bone and tenacity to meet it halfway — but that doesn’t matter, as long as there are people who do.

They are building a new world, seed by seed, watering it and waiting for it to grow. Whether they live to see it or not is immaterial.

What they have now, though, is the endless waste, landlocked by salt, visible through the window just above her head through the heat haze of midday. They have the burnt infinite ochre of the sand and the burned-in blue of a good day’s sky. The green places that they have must be protected, like all the softness in this world, and neither Furiosa nor Max are inclined to indulgence. This — her grip on his arms, the way he’s pushing his hips against her thigh — is anything but indulgent, anything but soft; Furiosa can’t name it, though. It isn’t transactional, because that’s just asking for trouble; it isn’t affectionate, particularly, because she cauterized those instincts in herself long ago.

Volatile, perhaps, then, like guzzoline that hasn’t been cut; like nudging, like the spray of droplets into vents, and that’s a pretty picture, now that she isn’t driving for life or death: Max’s mouth, chemical-wet and shining in the endless infernal light of the road; Max and his guarded understanding, and his even more matter-of-fact pragmatism that, from the right angle, almost looks like compassion. Furiosa doesn’t have the upper body strength or the leverage to pin his hips to the wall, unless she digs her heels in and shoves back, which is probably what he wants. What she can do is deter him by causing him pain, and she pins his shoulder with her elbow and digs her metal fingertips into the notch at the base of his neck, exploiting her hydraulics-enhanced grip strength until he goes white with pain and makes a noise as if he’s been kicked in the solar plexus.

“Down,” she says, and shoves at his shoulders before he’s stopped gasping. The way he obeys has nothing to do with trust — trust is something, like redemption, that is not stated but earned, and then performed again and again — and everything to do with understanding. Their comprehension of each other is also rooted in performance and action; ever since she tried to take his head off with a shotgun, and he failed to steal her war rig (hers even then, in nature if not in name), she’s been attuned to his gait, the way he moves through a crowd and takes up space, caught in an odd orbit around him. She doesn’t accommodate him so much as she incorporates him, just as he does now, going down so pretty, shifting his bulk onto his heels as she puts her back to the wall and watching her face for further instructions.

She tells him, the way she tends to — by acting, and by trusting him to catch up, and to catch her if needs be — shoves her leggings down, and when she shifts her weight he tugs them off, one leg after the other. “Well,” she says, echoing and answering his unspoken question, and shifts to widen her stance, hooking the joined fingers of her prosthetic around the bars of the window. She might wrench her shoulder, but she’ll stay upright, no matter what.

Max runs his hands up the backs of her calves, fingertips coarse and callused, the way she’s seen him do to the underside of a wheel well, checking to see that everything’s in working order, and wraps his big hands around her hips, pressing his thumbs into the edges of her hipbones, fingers curled around the creases of her thighs. When he leans in to lick her open, he isn’t tentative, but — it had taken Furiosa only a moment to grasp, but far longer to properly understand — he’s reserved, keeping himself in check. She remembers the water rationing under Immortan Joe, and the way her people looked before every deluge. They were absolutely desperate, but too wary — too clever — to show it, and to give Joe any more power over them than he already had; he already owned their bodies, so they would not give him their desires as well. Max is only just relearning what it is to want for himself to begin with.

Max is less wary than he used to be, when he snarled at her like something untamable and was perpetually coiled to spring, but he still takes his time, teasing her open with the tip of his tongue, and she thinks now that it’s more for himself than anything else. This is an extravagance — _she_ is — and one he only allows himself on occasion, when he’s been gone for months doing who knows what, and comes back dragging the carcass of some other settlement’s war rig, or a thousand gallons of guzzoline, or, once, a single sprouted seed, so delicate and tiny in his palm. He brings back trophies and tribute, and allows himself her pleasure as a reward.

Furiosa sees no contradiction in seeking redemption — in her view, a trajectory rather than a destination — while allowing herself pleasure. What happens to her is, after all, immaterial; it is the women under her care, and the people who rely on her, who matter. If Max asked — which he never will, not as long as they live in this vicious, violent world, neither with words nor through his actions — she would tell him this, but she understands that things are both more and less complicated for him. His body and mind are, at times, as hostile to him as the surrounding desert, and he has at best an uneasy relationship with both.

It’s easier for both of them, then, that she enables him in this, one hand in his short-shorn hair and the other locked around rusted iron that she cannot feel. Max is thorough, and she swings a leg up to accommodate his shoulders, scratches across the base of his skull and urges him closer. He’s still holding back, for all that his tongue is broad and flat and so good, and that his mouth is shining-slick with her, but she pivots a little with the movement of her leg and his grip tightens. That’s better — he’s exerting more of his strength, treating her less like something to put on a pedestal and more like the war rig that she is — but still not what she wants, and not what he needs, so she gets as much purchase as she can and tugs his hair until he leans back and looks up at her.

Max never closes his eyes when he’s with her, no matter what; he lets them slip out of focus, pupils big and black in the endless desert glow, or tips his head back so that she can’t make eye contact, but if she pulls him back with a hand on his throat or his jaw, he’s always looking. When Max sleeps, whether it’s in her chambers or on the road, he wakes up fighting without fail. Maybe he keeps his eyes open to stay fixed in the present, or to ground himself. Furiosa doesn’t consider it a question important enough to ask.

Now, she meets his gaze, and considers. Some days, what he needs is a fight; he needs a hand around his throat and a knee in the small of his back and to choose to let her win, and she’s all too happy to oblige. Other days, he needs to be left waiting, confused and frustrated until she lets him come to her later. Today, he’s just — off, slightly — jarred out of his skin, probably, performing a person who died long ago, and Furiosa doesn’t want or need that. She knows that, in the morning, she’ll be woken by the sound of his engines echoing through the mesas, and that her pallet will smell only of hot sand and the soot from her hands. Max gives himself to her piecewise, a few hours at a time, and she has no intention of spending them with someone else, even if that person looks at her through his eyes.

“Up,” she says, and guides him with a hand under his chin. He looks at her, confused and dissonant, almost, for such a carefully guarded person. It’s like the pursuit vehicles which have been decommissioned for planting, disrepair and rust even more visible against the new growth which they support. He should be utilitarian, not beautiful. Max should be dented and cracked, and even though it isn’t visible — even if it shows to someone who’s as familiar with him as he’ll let anyone get — it feels strange. 

Furiosa would not characterize herself as beautiful, simply because it isn’t relevant to what she does or who she is. She does not provide traction for being described as beautiful. Max, though — she wouldn’t call him beautiful either, because it would be like speaking scavenger tongues at him, but — she looks at him, and she sees the lethal desert sunrise, the iridescence of guzzoline-tainted drinking water, the heat haze that rises before a storm screams up in the west.

Now, his mouth swollen and raw-red, she realizes what it is: he is utilitarian, pared down, and he looks _used_. She’s seen Max in a fight, no motion wasted, and she’s seen him drive, almost brutal in his efficiency, and there’s something of that here too. He looks as if he’s found a purpose.

“Come on,” she says, unhooking her fingers from the bars (uncomfortable scrape, but what's a little more dust in a world of it) and walks him over to the pallet in the corner of the room. She could have the best chambers in the Citadel — it’s her right, as Imperator prodigal — but she doesn’t need them, and they’ve gone to the mothers instead. Better to raise the next generation in comfort that she has never known; after all, the reason she’s given up so much is that they don’t have to. Her rooms are perfectly adequate, and her real home is the road, anyway, until they build a green Citadel as a beacon of dangerous hope. He settles, on his knees again, while she shuffles through the bag by the foot of the pallet, until her fingers close around firm leather, specially sewn, and then again around the neck of a bottle, and he knows by know — he must — but there it is, that trust again. She won't let him go under the wheels.

Furiosa yanks at the straps of the harness, tightening them around her hips even as she adjusts her cock with the other hand, setting its base solidly and testing its give. She leaves her shirt on, and the buckled leather that anchors her left arm, though it'll make her movements a little less efficient than she'd like. This isn't about her, at least for the moment; most things aren't, even the ones that might end with her bleeding out into the thirsty sand, and have never been, so this concession is negligible in comparison, and neither she nor Max enjoy being beholden to anybody, so it's temporary at worst anyway. “Off,” she says, and he makes a noise of acquiescence, in his throat, the way he would if she asked him about supply routes, or the state of the power struggles in Gastown, even as he pulls his threadbare shirt over his head and shucks his boots.

He lifts his hips to shove his trousers down, curling his legs under him when he’s done to kneel again, and Furiosa remembers suddenly the first time she saw him, carrying warboy dead weight and snarling through a muzzle. Less than a day later, he had the kill switch sequence to her war rig. Their initial trust was that of two people backed up against each other in a fight with impossible odds, but she wonders if he’s ever thought, since, about trying the sequence again. It would work — she hasn’t reset it, the way she should have — but Furiosa isn’t sure which would be worse: Max knowing, though perhaps the magnitude of it would be beyond his field of vision, or Max simply assuming the worst. It’s no skin off her back either way, in the end. It’s just switches and gears, just like her, a creature of sequence and necessity.

Furiosa drips oil over her fingers, curls them into a fist to smear it with her thumb down to her knuckles; with her other hand she pushes at the back of his neck until his face is flush against the rough homespun, and he arches his back, presenting himself to her, arms folded to hide his face. There’s tension in Max's shoulders, in the way the muscles of his back bunch and pull, and she traces metal fingertips down the lines of his shoulder blades. When Furiosa tucks a finger into him almost as an afterthought, it’s as if he forgets that — forgets to be on guard, and on the defensive — for a moment, and sighs into it, a full-body slump, before he freezes up again.

She feels it, inside and out, and gentles him through it; she doesn’t have the words, anymore, to say the sort of sweet and soothing things that she imagines would be helpful. She knew them once, but they are rusty with disuse, and crumble at the faintest touch. Instead, she holds him by the nape of his neck, and when he relaxes she curls another finger into him, and strokes soothing circles until the tension leaches from his shoulders to his hands. Max curls fists into the sheets, and hides his face in the crook of his elbow, and she drips more oil where he’s stretched around her and adds a third finger.

It’s a slow negotiation, when he gets like this, a step at a time before Furiosa shifts her weight. Today, she is patient, and careful not to scrape when she places her hand between the wings of his shoulder blades, twists her fingers until he’s pushing back, hips rolling instinctively. Furiosa hums her approval, pressing with the pads of her fingers until he jerks and makes a sound that she associates more closely with pain than pleasure. Sometimes the two are the same, for them; sometimes bone-deep agony is clarifying flame, and sometimes the gentlest touch is worse than a broken bone. Now, Max makes that sound again, pitched high and breathy, and when she rubs the pad of her thumb to follow where oil has dripped over delicate skin, he sustains it over the course of a long exhale, needy and overwhelmed.

“Good?” Furiosa asks. She knows the answer, without a doubt, reads it in his breathing and his spread legs as easily as the shaking of a rig off-road, but he isn’t one, and so she asks. If Max has to answer, then he has to be there with her in the same moment, body and shreds of soul. When he raises his head to nod, then, she doesn’t smile, precisely, but lets herself relax into something that could be mistaken in the right light for satisfaction. “Good,” she says again, this time as confirmation, and curls her fingers around his hip, and presses forward, cants her hips until she’s sliding, easy, into him, and his breaths, if she tried, could be sobs.

They aren’t, of course; she’s not sure that Max would know how to cry to begin with. She certainly doesn’t. Even at her worst, Furiosa finds her eyes dry, and wishes sometimes that she could weep as simply as Capable, or Cheedo, who seem to take such comfort in it. She takes comfort instead in action, and she does so now, rocking her hips against Max’s until his shoulders come down and he begins to take up space again, bracing his elbows for the smallest amount of leverage as she barely fucks into him.

“More,” Max says, in the way that he has of phrasing a question as a statement and waiting for approval or correction, and Furiosa shakes her head.

“No,” she says, and regains some grip on the nape of his neck. “Not yet,” Furiosa says, but concedes in her rhythm, speeding up to match strokes to the pattern of her breathing. Max bears it, as well as he bears anything, which is to say only for as long as he has to, and when she starts to fuck him in earnest, long strokes, hard and fast, he cries out, that same agonized relief in his voice. Furiosa’s made him come like this before, and he had been begging for it in all but voice by the end, shoving back to meet her and hands fisted so tightly in the sheets that he’d torn them.

This time, though, she thinks that it is kindness that will jolt him back into himself, and so she wraps her hand around him, thumbing over the head of his cock and using the remnants of the oil as slick. She strokes him hard and fast to match the rhythm of her hips, and when she tightens her grip, he makes a noise that seems to get stuck in his throat, fragmentary and shocked, and comes, twitching in her hand and shaking so that she feels it in her shoulder where her hand is still on his neck. Furiosa fucks him through it, letting him grind back against her, and when he slumps, she moves with him, pulls out and lets him lie, fucked-out, while she undoes the buckles at her hips and discards the harness and cock atop his shirt.

“Over,” she says, nudging Max with her bare toes in his ribs, and he does, one arm still flung over his eyes. “Get this off.” Furiosa kneels beside him as he undoes the buckles at her waist, this time, and lets her arm fall to the floor, clattering, leather beside it still warm and curved from her body, before she slings a leg over his face. “Hold me up,” she says, because these are always a confusing few seconds, while she recalibrates her center of gravity and remembers that she doesn’t have to compensate for a metal limb at the moment. Max settles a hand on her right hip, giving her pressure to lean into, and this time, when he nuzzles into her, it’s exactly what she wants. He’s sloppy, and greedy, and the single-minded instinct that he usually focuses on survival is retrained on her, and making her feel good, and making her shake against his mouth.

It’s good to be able to breathe properly, too, without leather against her ribs, and Furiosa takes a deep breath, feels Max’s hand on the back of her thigh, and feels light-headed, as if she’s running on fumes. “Come on,” she grits out, shoulders tight in a way through which she can’t remember expressing tension before she met him, and can no longer tell if she has only just noticed or has only just begun. “Come on — Max —” She rocks down hard, and she doesn’t know when he got his hand between her legs, but he slides the tips of her fingers through the slick on her thighs, slips them into her and presses — fingertips and tongue, and his fingers are so _good_ , the press of them, the stretch, and his mouth for her to grind down against — and she gasps, wordless, and comes, heart pounding, and feels it through her entire body, like ignition.

When she goes to move, Max rests a hand just under the curve of her breast, thumb tucked into the crease, and moves with her until she’s settled, back against the wall again and legs open in a messy sprawl. What happens now is simple, and easy: it’s time for her to check on the staples that they are growing where once women were treated as fallow fields, and to talk to the women who are now in charge of the water that they all need, who are mothers, yes, but give life in so many more ways; they give it in the form of water, and in the form of love, and in the form of the green place that they all want to be alive to see come to fruition, and, yes, they give it in the form of war, when they need to, without mercy, which is a form of love in and of itself, sometimes. When Furiosa returns, Max will be here, or he will not; if he is not, she will hear engines, and if he is, then they are once again off-road, tearing into the unknown in a billow of burnt copper.

It doesn’t matter. They will catch each other regardless.

(He is.)

 


End file.
